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Sunday, October 18, 2015

Joyful Hallowe'en: Mild Fear 2015 begins with a vintage postcard

The sun has set. A decided chill is in the air. It's time for the launch of Fortnight of Mild Fear — 14 days of spooky ephemera and other haunting posts that would have made ghost-story writer Sheridan Le Fanu proud, if he hadn't up and died 121 years before the invention of blogging.1

The above Hallowe'en postcard has never been used or written upon, which is a shame.2 There is no date or publisher listed on the front of back. And neither the Internet nor my scrying mirror is any help. So it's a bit of a mystery.

The illustration, though, is pretty fabulous: A frightened boy in the forest, surrounded by smiling trees, smiling mushrooms and a very large frog. It's very possible that he's tripping. Plus, a carved pumpkin and a black added at the bottom, for good measure.

Some thoughts:

These trees look far friendlier than the Fighting Trees of Oz or the bone-crunching, flesh-munching trees in Sarah's Mortal Kombat: Komplete Edition videogame.

Public service announcement: While these mushrooms look quite peaceful, many red mushrooms are poisonous. Also, you should probably never eat a mushroom that has a human face.

The boy is actually, by far, the scariest-looking thing in that forest.

Footnotes1. Per A Brief History of Blogging: "It's generally recognized that the first blog was Links.net, created by Justin Hall, while he was a Swarthmore College student in 1994. Of course, at that time they weren't called blogs, and he just referred to it as his personal homepage. It wasn't until 1997 that the term 'weblog' was coined."
2. As I've often stated, postcards are meant to used. They should not remain blank, inside albums and plastic sleeves and boxes. After they've been mailed, of course, it's OK to stick 'em in a safe place, so that alien beings can find them when they visit our barren planet in 31,275 A.D. and wonder what the heck we were all about.

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About the Author

I'm Chris Otto, a Pennsylvania resident and journalist whose hobbies and interests include old books, ephemera, history, folklore, alpacas, photography and much more. Never stop reading, learning and asking questions! I consider this blog to be a spiritual descendant of Microsoft Encarta and a companion to Wikipedia. Every piece of paper tells a story.
Reach me at chrisottopa (at) gmail.com.

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